Hog Island Light guided vessels along Virginia’s Atlantic barrier islands near Great Machipongo Inlet, serving the Eastern Shore trade that grew through Thomas’s Wharf after produce shipping expanded in the early nineteenth century. A first lighthouse, a forty-five-foot brick tower, was built in 1853, but erosion made it unsafe and it was replaced in 1896 by a much taller iron skeleton tower, one of the tallest in the United States. Storm damage, shifting shoreline, declining coastal shipping, and new navigation technology ended the station, which was deactivated and demolished after waves reached its base. Its great Fresnel lens survives in preservation.